FonDat1: A Speech Synthesis Corpus for Norwegian
Ingunn Amdal, Torbjørn Karl Svendsen · 2006
This paper describes the Norwegian speech database FonDat1 designed for development and assessment of Norwegian unit selection speech synthesis.The quality of unit selection speech synthesis systems depends highly on the database used.The database should contain sufficient phonemic and prosodic coverage.High quality unit selection synthesis also requires that the database is annotated with accurate information about identity and position of the units.Traditionally this involves much manual work, either by hand labeling the entire database or by correcting automatic annotations.We are working on methods for a complete automation of the annotation process.To validate these methods a realistic unit selection synthesis database is needed.In addition to serve as a testbed for annotation tools and synthesis experiments, the process of producing the database using automatic methods is in itself an important result.FonDat1 contains studio recordings of approximately 2000 sentences read by two professional speakers, one male and one female.10% of the database is manually annotated.